I'm not an elder

Bernie Goldbach's fascinating post about the history of the Irish blogosphere got me thinking about my own backstory in this little corner of the web. I used to think I was relatively early to the party so its eye-opening to learn that the likes of Donncha O'Caoimh was blogging in the last century.

The archives for MMSmemo* seem to have withered away so I was struggling to put an exact date on when I cut the ribbon but Bernie says it's not a blog if it doesn't have a feed so Martin Little helped me determine that I made a start sometime around September 2003. Although I listed on Blogshares in April of that year and I'd swear I was publishing reverse chronological feedless pages sometime in 2002. So perhaps I wasn't too far behind the advance troops.

Ironically Bernie's (original) blog was the first Irish blog that I recognised as such and certainly the first I subscribed to in Bloglines**. Which means his recollection of events is authorative in my eyes and I can't suggest any omissions or inaccuracies in his draft.

* Yes it was even geekier than this blog ;-)
* The first non-Irish blog I subscribed to was, naturally, Dave Winer's

Comments

[Ken McGuire]

Would be nice to see something like this on a grand scale. Maybe invite bloggers to post their start dates (at least according to their first blog post), document the history of blogging in Ireland. Would certainly make for a good reference point.

[Bernie Goldbach]

I think it's important to mark this conversation by asking people to acknowledge who has gone before them in Irish blog space.

I think it's also important to mark the same kind of social connectivity in terms of IRC, mailing lists, and discussion boards.

I suspect the techies, some cited in Adventures in Code, have email archives from 1994 and that was the first kind of social networking in Ireland.

Then IRC and discussion boards came onstream.

Then personal journals, blogs, and ultimately the meme-friendly RSS blogging we have today.

[Keith Gaughan]

Ditto here. I started blogging (though I didn't realise it at the time) on my college website back in '98 when I was teaching myself ASP. Then I started hand-maintaining a HTML-based weblog on some webspace that came with my Eircom.net account. Then I discovered weblogs.com and Dave Winer in 2001 and deleted most of the content off the old Eircom site and moved there. Then Dave shut it down, which finally gave me the impetus to use the domain I'd lying around for about a year before that.

Does that make me an elder?

[John McCormac]

Actually much of the early social networking would have taken place via the dial-up bulletin board systems in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There was quite a vibrant BBS scene in Ireland back then. Galway Online grew into Ireland Online and many of the first generation internet developers and techies were to be found on these BBSes. Some of the people mentioned in Adventures In Code might have been there but the real elders know who they are.

[Bernie Goldbach]

At least two Irish universities are surveying blogspace at the moment concerning this kind of social networking. I think I'm going to open a wiki on it so we can write the community version of Adventures in Irish Blogging.

[Ken McGuire]

A wiki... now theres a good point. DCU are passing out survey emails over the weekend on blogging in Ireland for an MSc research project.

I'd remember Nemesis BBS and the old IOL IRC service from 94/95. Developing all of this into a steady timeline would be a fantastic resource for future research.

[bernard]

Hi,

The lady's name in DCU is Mary Loftus, she contacted me about her survey http://tinyurl.com/rkpak

hth,

hi again James. you a happy man today? TO-YO-TA!!

bernard

[Justin Mason]

'I suspect the techies, some cited in Adventures in Code, have email archives from 1994 and that was the first kind of social networking in Ireland.'

actually, before the mailing lists, there were the ie.* newsgroups -- which I understand are still about ;)

[James Corbett]

Yes Bernard, I loved that bit in the Examiner about the age old battlecry in Munster - TO-YO- TA ;-)